Experience buys you time. Good references help a project, but they're not what saves it. What saves it is knowing the tools within your reach and the creative processes you can run. I'm not an animator. Still, this project, which started recently here at the studio, called for animation: hand-drawn characters, in thin lines, living around 3D pieces from a furniture company, for a set of product Reels. The client needed it in two days. Done the traditional way, it would have taken far longer, so I turned to AI tools. But using the tool for the tool's sake would never have gotten me here. What got me here was the process. I spent my time hunting for the right reference, and found it in Vitra's "Mariposa Family" film, an excellent reference for illustration and for bringing 3D and drawing together. From there, the tools and the workflow I've built over the years did the rest. There's still room to improve, I know, but it's a good step forward. I hear a lot that AI will take some designers' jobs. Maybe it will. But I see it a little differently. AI lets you do things that used to take far more complex processes. An axe in a lumberjack's hands brings a tree down. In a beginner's hands, it rarely gets the same result. AI works the same way: in the hands of someone who knows how to use it, it doesn't take work away. It creates more. The tools will keep changing. What doesn't change is each designer's sense of aesthetics: knowing what fits, how it fits, and what to do. AI can make almost anything. Deciding what deserves to be made is still up to us. Has AI taken work from you, or brought you more?